Monday, April 25, 2011

The following shield BC team represents a solid, not particularly expensive setup that most alliances should have no difficulty making full use of. Lacking the bling T2 and faction ships (only the logistics cruiser is not T1), this setup takes advantage of the now 10 point cost of the Tier-1 BC. The end result is a very, very high damage, reasonably fast and reasonably inexpensive team. What it lacks in resiliency it makes up with plenty of e-war and massive total DPS!

Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hammerhead II x3
Hobgoblin II x2

This puppy can lay out a total of 608 dps with drones and without overheating. It can go over 1750 m/s with the squad bonuses, 2500m/s overheated. And it still has room for an e-war module and a stasis webifier.

Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hobgoblin II x5

Not quite as hard hitting as the other two battlecruisers the Ferox makes up for it with a gang link and fits two e-war modules. Even then it can do 450 DPS. Each Ferox should have a different gang link. One Rapid Deployment and one shield Harmonizing link. The third link can be something to improve e-war, improve sensor strength, or another shield link.

Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hammerhead II x5

A Brutix is well named as it pretty much face-rapes the target. When shield tanked this ship can output an astonighing 860 DPS. Once two of these bad boys get their hands on the target, it is game over.

Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hammerhead II x3
Hobgoblin II x2

Guaranteed to make the team an instant favourite with the commentators the Belicose actually has a purpose in all this. Unlike the faster stabber or the tougher Rupture, the Belicose can fit 4 medium modules giving it a proper shield tank and a stasis webifier. The Belicose basically acts as a heavy tackler able to go 3800 m/s overheated it quickly gets to a target and slows it down. Unlike a frigate however it has sufficient buffer tank to give time for logistics to rep.

How to fly

The basic idea for this setup is to go from enemy ship to enemy ship and engage at point blank range. The Bellicose is the main first tackle, slowing even fast targets down enough for the Cyclones to catch up. Once a target is pinned the belicose moves on to the next target while the big guns hit it. Total DPS is nearly 6000, more then enough to overwhelm the toughest tanks. Meanwhile a total of 9 sensor dampers with targeting range scripts and 3 tracking disruptors helps to mitigate enemy DPS, or force them to engage at close range as well.

Qualifying Round

This setup adjusts easily for the qualifying round. Just go with the Minmattar ships and you are golden.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

And now for something completely different.... All of my previous setups have concentrated on medium sized weapons to deliver the damage. Medium weapons have great tracking compared to their BS counterparts. However BS can still be more than viable. The following rather bling setup uses 3 Macharials for the primary DPS. Logistics is handled by a nearly maxed out Basilisk and a Vulture. 3 Destroyers and an interdictor fill out the remaining 9 points.

Large Core Defence Field Extender I
Large Core Defence Field Extender I
Large Core Defence Field Extender I

Ogre II x3
Hammerhead II x2

What more needs to be said.... take 2 hurricanes and strap them together. Over 1200 DPS, Fast, able to shoot across the arena, the Macharial is worth everyone of the 21 points and billion isk cost. I suggest at least one if not two Macharials fit Shield logistics drones and stay in range of the logi ship.

Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Light Shield Maintenance Bot II x5

Five large shield transporters means that the whole fleet can tank unholy damage even at 70 km of range. The power transfer is to be placed on the Vulture who returns the favour keeping the shield reps humming.

Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I

A thrasher would also be a nice choice, but a Cormerant gives an extra midslot for ewar. This things will die if the enemy focuses on them, but a good logistics pilot might be able to keep them alive. If they get close to the targets then the damage they can do is quite respectable for their 2 point cost.

Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I

Cannon fodder like the Cormerant, but a little bit more punch. Expect to be primaried early on.

How to fly

The goal of this setup is to deliver unholy DPS on the target (4000 DPS) from the 3 battleships. Logistics is also pretty much maxed out to give these expensive but somewhat fragile boats plenty of survivability. The BS should spread out a bit so that the enemy can not get high transfersal against all three. The small ships fly around either adding to DPS or simply providing an ewar platform.

The real key to this setup is the Basilisk - Vulture synergy. With the two ships exchanging cap, there is no issue powering the 5 large reppers on the Basilisk. Being shield reppers they provide the bonus at the start of the cycle. With the bonuses from the Vulture each ship has a 25% bonus to shield resists giving them both 25 higher shield buffer plus each shield HP from the reppers is 25% more effective. In addition the reppers provide 25% more shield HP per second, yet use no additional cap per second.

The biggest threats a fleet like this has is tracking disruptors. Mitigate this the normal way by minimizing transversal and killing those e-war ships early on.

Preliminary round setups

Drop the Macharials for two similar Vargur maurader, on setup to provide cap to the basilisk. Throw in a cormerant for projected ECCM and you are golden. Should be a good setup.

Monday, April 18, 2011

After covering a few shield tanking teams I thought it would be good to cover an armour tanking one. The following setup is a pretty generic setup using Armour tanked Tier-2 battlecruisers for the main DPS with midslots dedicated to e-war. A Damnation Command ship passes bonuses to all ships plus cap to the Guardian ship. A Vengeance and a Malediction round out the setup with some much needed tackle.

Scorch is GOD :). Power to the enemy as fast as you can (which for an armour ship isn't very fast), get into optimal and pound away. Each of the BC in the fleet has e-war so work with them to maximize disruption of the enemy weapon systems. Call for reps as needed.

Relatively heavy tackle. Take over tackle from the Malediction. A 12k+ EHP tank makes this a tough cookie, especially against Warrior II drones. Call for reps as soon as you take damage ... you are going to need it.

[Guardian]
... will cover logistics in a future article.

How To Fly

This is a pretty straightforward team. Combining fairly good DPS with a tough tank and lots of non-bonused e-war modules. Fly your 5 BC together in a blob. If going against another short range setup just have a nice furr-ball. If going against a longer range setup use the tacklers to stop targets giving time for the BC to catch up. In general place the tracking disruption on turret ships (duh!) and sensor dampers on the enemy logistics and long range setups to keep the enemy in close. The biggest e-war threats to this setup is probably tracking disruptors since most the the DPS comes from turrets. If you see an arbi, sentinel or a curse on the field... they should be primaried. Otherwise go after enemy logistics first and then through their DPS.

One nice thing about this setup is you are probably already flying this in normal BC gangs. As a result your FC should have a pretty good idea of the setup's strengths and weaknesses and how to use them. This team will do well against most other close range setups. It will struggle with long range setups (like Missile S.P.A.M.) but through the use of sensor dampers with range scripts + effective use of tackle it should do okay if well piloted.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

This is a simple, very frequently used and surprisingly effective setup. It is built around Drakes and Tengus sporting a brutal shield tank and long-ranged missiles. Missiles are great in the tournament because tracking disruptor are ineffective against them, they can be swapped for FOF missiles if jammed, and they have great range with 100% hit rate. In past tournaments drakes and Tengus have been the most flown ships for this reason. Both these platforms provide huge tanks, are hard to jam, and easy to fly for many carebear centric corps.

Here is the setup being used in the opening match of AT-8

Here is the setup loosing to a high damage setup:

For my recommendation I go with a bit more purity of just drakes and tengus..As shown by the above match, the lighter ships just don't really add a lot to the whole operation. However the logistics is still a critical ship.

Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hobgoblin II x5

The Drake is rightfully known as a brick. It does about 467 DPS albeit at a shorter range then the tengu (around 84 km) and uses drones for some of that damage. By placing a different Siege Warefare link on each Drake the whole gang will benefit from effective shield repping and higher resists

[Basilisk, Basilisk Bait]
or
[Basilisk, Single Rep]

I will discuss the options for logistics in a later post. However for this setup it makes a lot of sense to swap between a 'real' logistics setup and a 'bait' logistics setup.

How To Fly
The basic idea for this setup is to scatter. Ideally keep everyone within the 70km range of the logistics, however the tanks are so tough this is less of an issue then normal. Most short range high damage setups will then have further to fly between targets if they actually start to take out your ships. Try to encourage them to primary the Tengus before the Drakes, keeping the gang bonuses alive.

Focus your damage on the enemy logistics. The total damage from this setup is pretty good but sometimes an enemy logistics ship can tank your damage. If so it is most certainly because they have logistics drones helping them out. If it looks like this is the case then quickly switch to the logistics drones. Pilots who are shooting from a long range should not wait until the drone is dead before switching targets. Once most/all of the drones are down then switch back to the ship and take it out. Once the enemy logistics is down then go after other ships one at a time. Trying to go after tacklers is a good idea since anything to increase the amount of time it takes for the enemy to switch targets is a good thing.

Logistics options for this setup include either a standard Basilisk or one with a powerful active tank to act as a bait ship. Since the DPS ships have very good buffer tanks, logistics is not as important as in some other setups which depend on logistics to keep ships alive.

As mentioned this setup is pretty resistant to E-War. By going with only one race (Caldari) enemy ECM will be spread more thinly. Even so, most of these ships have a naturally high sensor strength so jamming will not come easily. Be sure to pack a couple of rounds of FOF missiles in case of an ECM heavy team. Sensor dampeners are somewhat effective and forcing the ships closer in, but again, these ships have naturally long target ranges so their effectiveness is relatively low. Tracking disruptors are naturally useless.

This setup is light on e-war. If this is a concern for the FC swapping the damage drones to ecm drones may be a good idea. A target painter fits into each Drake (barely with a 3% implant) boosting the primary's signature radius which is critical when trying to take down Scimatars or other small sig radius ships.

Probably the best thing about this setup is the relative ease of use. Unlike the Team Minmattar setup which requires some fancy mistake free flying to keep at optimal, these ship are pretty easy. Fire at the primary and try to keep within the arena bounds. This is an ideal setup for a Carebear alliance for that reason.

Preliminary Round Setup

Scaling this setup down for the 50 point/5 pilot preliminary rounds is a bit of a challenge. Considering the higher logistics ratio for this round, I just don't see these setups being able to actually kill anything. Three Drakes and a logi work out to 51 points so that won't work.

Friday, April 15, 2011

One thing I have noticed from previous tournaments is the number of sheer crap setups being fielded. In an effort to improve the tournament I am going to post about several common and not-so-common setups that are viable for the tournament.

The 'Team Minmattar' setup is a common setup from strong PVP alliances. Most notably, it was used by PL during the AT-7 semi final and during most of AT-8 including the AT-8 final.

The main idea behind this setup is to have both high speed and heavy firepower. The basic setup is as follows:

There are lots of possible minor variations here. One or more command ships can be swapped for Lokis. Switching command ships to hurricanes frees up a few points as well for other things. However I feel that the above is the core concept and would work very well. Lets look at some possible fits ...

The Sliepnirs are the heavy hitters of this setup. With over 700 dps (overheated) they pack a hell of a punch. On two of the Sliepnirs the Energy neut should be replaced with gang links. One for shield efficiency and the other for sensor integrity. The third one should have a Medium Smartbomb to deal with drones if needed.

Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I

The Sabre is an easy way to get a lot of DPS out of only a few points. With around 1000 DPS between the three of them, these provide a lot of punch and significant tackle / ewar but use up just over half the points of a command ship in total.

Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I

Two points left... might as well throw on a bunch more hard hitting DPS. Basically a T1 version of the Sabre, lots of damage for only a few points. No tank but it counts on the opponent wasting time shooting at it when there are other more important ships available. Also great at killing drones and/or enemy tacklers.

How to fly
The basic idea of this setup is to very quickly get into range of the enemy and lay down a boatload of concentrated DPS. Depending on what the enemy has use either high damage RF ammo at close range. Alternatively use barrage to increase range and keep out of the enemy killzone. Using high damage ammo the fleet can deliver close to 4000 mostly selectable damage type DPS, more than enough to overcome enemy logistics. With the claymore bonuses overheated each of these ships should be able to easily go 2800 m/s or higher. This seriously reduces incoming damage from any missiles and it means that the blob can quickly switch from target to target even if they scatter around the arena.

At the beginning of the fight logistics drones are assigned to the Scimitar. With 15 medium and 10 light logistics drones, this should give it pretty good survivability. Care must be taken however to keep in the drone range of the combat ships. The logistics ship itself should probably pulse it's MWD if it has one to get out to about 30 km range and then use the AB to minimize signature radius making it a very hard target to hit with missiles and guns. The bonus from the claymore really helps here. From there the Scimatar should be able to provide excellent sheild reps to the high T2-minmattar resist shields on the DPS ships, and the Huginn. Being shield logistics the repair happens at the beginning of the cycle rather the end so switching reps is easier then for an armour logistics ship. If taking fire it is important for the pilots to overheat their invul fields to maximize logistics reps. I also suggest the logistics ship put it's light shield drones onto the Huginn as that is the most vulnerable key ship.

The Huginn acts a heavy tackler. It either sits with the DPS boats pinning the target down and boosting its signature radius. Alternatively it chases after the secondary target, pinning it down so that the DPS can get to it faster. With the bonus and gang links the web should reach out about 50+ km. Any enemy Dramiel or other tackler will find itself wishing it were somewhere else.

I have placed a sensor dampers with range scripts onto the Claymore and at lease one additional one should be fitted to a sabre. These should be used to either reduce the range of the enemy logistics, forcing their fleet close together, or put against an enemy long-range ship like a heavy missile Tengu, forcing it to close with our fleet. One or two tracking disruptors on the other sabres should provide a little ability to mess with enemy turret ships.

Target selection depends on the FC's feeling of the major threats. I would personally go after TD bonused boats first (curse, arbitrator, sentinel, etc), followed by ECM (rook, blackbird) then logistics saving the DPS boats for last.

The ECCM modules are to mitigate the serious weakness that Minmattar setups traditionally have to ECM boats. One module may not be enough. In the AT-8 final PL apparently added a second ECCM module suspecting correctly that they would face the very ECM heavy Hydra Reloaded team. This worked very well.

Preliminary Round Setup

Scaling this setup down for the 50 point/5 pilot preliminary rounds should be easy.

In this case we manage to keep over half of the DPS, we just loose the long range webs of the Huginn. In exchange it makes sense to make sure that at least one of the Sleipnirs has a webifier, if not both. Also we end up with only two non-bonused command links, one on each field command ship. This should still work quite well.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

I had this great post about the new banning rule, however the rule has now been removed. I can understand why. Although the rule could have made for some interesting matches, in general it moved teams towards less innovative setups and also would have sucked for the poor player who was banned. C'est la vie.

Best Gank
Winner is ... Borgel Slydaeus' Incursus
Really the only entry that could be considered for this category. However, getting a cheapfleet frigate over 100 dps + tackle and speed to get in range is pure win.

Best ship to bring to a fleet
Winner is ... FNG's Crucifier
As a sometime gang leader, this is the sort of ship you love when new players come along. Cheap ship with low skills trashing the effectiveness of up to three enemy ships. Gotta love it!

(see best e-war for the fit)

Best ship for solo work
Winner is ... Zamemee's Old School Punisher
Hard category to judge since so many entries. However with a big buffer tank combined with a good active tank and decent DPS, this is the ship I would place my bets on.

Pseudoelectron Containment Field I
200mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I
Small Automated I Carapace Restoration
Radioisotope Adaptive Nano Membrane I

[Empty Rig slot]
[Empty Rig slot]
[Empty Rig slot]

Grand Prize

As for the grand prize ....
It comes down to two ships, the Old School Punisher and the FNG's Crucifier. One ship excels at solo work, the other is exactly the sort of ship that should be brought by new characters to a fleet. Perhaps I should retrack my statements in the past that new players should choose Minmattar.

The Winner is ... FNG's Crucifier
I just like this ship. Super easy to fit. This is the sort of ship that would make a great introduction to faction warfare, or joining up with a pirate gang. Vagabonds and Hurricane's beware, their fleet has a Crucifier.

Congrats to the winners, prizes should have been awarded by now. Thanks to all who participated.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

I was just about to consider quitting EVE when along comes the ever exciting Alliance Tournament. WHoooo Hoooo. Personally I consider the Alliance tournament to be a whole lot of fun. Regrettably I have never been able to participate it beyond helping with some training and a lot of Forum Whoring.

This year there are a lot of rule changes, some more controversial than others. In today's post I will look at the changes to points.

Ship Type

Points

AT 7

AT 8

AT 9

Battleship, Faction

21

21

21

Marauder

19

19

18

Battleship

18

18

18

Black Ops Battleship

18

18

18

Command Ship

16

16

16

Strategic Cruiser

16

16

16

Cruiser, Faction

13

14

14

Heavy Assault Cruiser

15

14

13

Battlecruiser (Tier 2)

13

13

13

Recon Ship

13

13

13

Heavy Interdictor

13

13

13

Logistics Cruiser

12

12

12

Battlecruiser (Tier 1)

11

11

10

Cruiser

11

9

8

Bomber

6

6

6

Electronic Attack Frigate

5

5

5

Frigate, Faction

4

4

4

Assault Frigate

4

4

4

Interdictor

3

3

3

Interceptor

3

3

3

Frigate

3

3

3

Hauler

3

3

3

Destroyer

2

2

2

I have highlighted the changes for AT-9 in RED. As you can see Tier 1 Battlecruisers, Cruisers and HACS have all had their point values lowered. Marauders also have been lowered. Tier-1 BCs are particularly interesting since they are now worth 10 points, the average number of points per ship allowed on a team. Especially with the new (and controversial) banning rule (edit: Banning rule has been removed), a team of Tier-1 BCs would have no one ship worth more than another, and thus no obvious ship to ban. I expect to see lots of Cyclones, Brutix, Ferox and Prophesies being fielded. Also interesting are HACS which are now worth a full two points less then in AT-7. In AT-7 they were almost totally absent due to being worth more than a faction cruiser. In AT-8 they were worth the same but now they are worth less. I expect to see a lot of Ishtars and Vagabonds being fielded. Maybe even an Armour-HAC gang of Zealots. The Cerberus also now makes a viable lighter alternative to the ever present Tengu from AT-8.

Marauders are pretty rare in tournament mainly due to their massive shortcoming of low sensor strength. I am not sure if the one point drop in value is enough to remedy this. Also, with the banning rule in effect, it would be pretty risky to put 18 points into a ship that the other team can simply remove.

Monday, April 11, 2011

First a note to my three readers.... I am not dead... just very very busy with IRL stuff (moving, work, etc). I will get to the cheapfleet challenge prizes soonTM I promise.

Now that the CSM 6 is underway under the leadership of Chairmen Mau/The Mittani/Mittens they have decided to start doing things. It seems that unlike previous CSMs that tried to operate in the way that CCP intended, the new CSM is planning to completely ignore the normal rules and procedures and try and operate more efficiently. The leadership seems to think the best way to get going is to place and ‘issue spotlight' on Time Dilation being worked on by team gridlock.

What is Time Dilation

I first say Time Dilation mentioned in a dev blog (unable to find link however so it may have been my imagination) and it appears to have been mentioned during fan fest. What it involves is slowing down the order of events in the game during situations of high lag. To the players things would appear to be moving slower, however it would remain consistent. Right now the frustrating thing about high lag fights is that players really don't know what is going on in the system. They might be warping around and jumping out, when on the server it is just waiting for an opportunity to generate their killmail. In other cases the lag is so bad that the client can't ever get a handle on what is happening and players are loosing capitals while seeing nothing more than a black screen. Naturally this has led to a lot of frustration.

Time dilation would slow every event down. As a person looking at the battle things would seem to be moving ridiculously slowly. However. if you recorded your screen and then played it back with a fast forward, it would look normal. Ships would take the usual amount of time to lock. Reppers would take the usual amount of time to repair, ships would move at the normal velocity and guns/missiles would fire at the normal rate.

Under this situation if the lag was such that the server could only process 10% of the requests per second, things would run at 10% of the speed. A ship that took 10 seconds to lock would seem to take 100 seconds. A gun that fired every five seconds would seem to fire every 50 seconds.

What I wonder though is why the CSM is even talking about this, let alone shining a spotlight on it. Clearly some the members of the CSM think that this technique will SOLVE the lag problems. Obviously CCP developers are looking into this very closely already. What concerns me, as a developer, is that the CSM is trying to tell the developers what to do. If the VP on my company came to me and said 'Look Tot, I think we should develop this new report in C++ because it is really fast' I would think he was an idiot. The developers at CCP really don't need, want or benefit from having the CSM dictate how they go about optimizing the code-base.

There are a lot of things that could go wrong with Time Dilation. Here are two of them:
1. From reading dev-blogs a lot of the issues that cause lag are related to locking. When things go under a lot of stress the objects in memory for the servers are getting locked up by other tasks. Time dilation will do nothing to help this and will probably make locking worse since time itself will be locked. Processes will not be allowed to do work because they are waiting for the next second to tick over. Aside from the obvious potential for the whole node freezing up, this could seriously negatively affect performance.

2. In general the load on a server from an online game is equal to the square of the users. With time dilation this will not go away. If a node can handle a fight of say 100 players in real-time without lag, then having 2000 players in one system will mean that time will run 20*20=400 times slower or about 9 seconds per hour. By the time players have shot their artilery twice, we will hit downtime. Hardly a satisfying experience. With 4000 players it becomes 40*40 = 1600 time slower or about 2 seconds per hour! What do you think is going to happen if PL catches 10 Goonswarm Titans in bubbles? If you don't think Goonswarm (or any other alliance in a similar situation) won't bring as many players into the system as it takes to effectively stop time, you are playing a different game than me.

Instead of just implementing Time Dilation, the developers at CCP are instead working on improving their algorithms to get as much speed as possible out of the system as is. It is a painstaking process that does take time, and they may resort to Time Dilation as a last resort, but it is not a solution to all of the lag problems by itself. Rather it is a tool that can handle extreme cases, only if the rest of the system has been brought up to snuff. That is the right way to do it.

So CCP developers, don't listen to the CSM regarding time dilation. Continue to do your jobs as you have been doing and good luck :)

And CSM .... concentrate on your job, dealing with features and the design of EVE. It is okay to stress the issue of lag and the problems it causes, but don't tell developers how to do their jobs. At best you will be ignored.

Followers

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